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Archive for the ‘books read’ Category

To be honest I wasn't expecting much of this - I only bought it when I spotted it in the charity bookshop, not exactly a must read. There are plenty of original Christies that I haven't read and could if I really wanted to read that kind of thing. So the fact that I quite enjoyed it probably stems from the fact that my expectations were pretty low to start with.

It was a good idea to give Poirot a new sidekick-narrator (I presume, he has several different ones as well as Hastings in the original books). Though perhaps it wasn't such a good idea to make him quite so dim. I was waiting for him to suddenly twist something and spot something that Poirot hadn't done, thereby making his presence in the book useful, but it never happened. He was supposed to be a young up-and-coming Scotland Yard detective but I could never figure out why that was.

The plot was pretty preposterous but I was willing to go along with it, Christie did preposterous pretty well herself. The book just felt overlong compared with my memories of the originals which were paperbacks to be thrown off on a train journey, not hours and hours of convoluted complications. The characters felt pretty much like Christie's though, I didn't feel Poirot had been dragged too far into the twenty-first century.

In the end, it was okay, nothing special, and given that there can't be that many people who have read all the original Christies and still hanker for more whilst not wanting to re-read, this really isn't any more than an extended advert by Christie's estate for all her other books.

This is an interesting book all about the goings on underneath London, delving into archeology, underground rivers, the Tube, sewers and all kinds of other subterranean bits and pieces. I remember hearing rumours (and probably spreading them too) of there being various secret tunnels connecting government buildings and other institutions when I was a student in London and this would have been great to read then (long before it was published however) which was why I snapped it up to read when I saw it in the bookshop. It took me ages to read it because every chapter sent me off to commune with a search engine and find out more using the things Ackroyd had just informed me about as the start of a search. Ultimately that's my only disappointment with the book - it's brief and a jumping off point for doing your own research, not a fully researched historical volume in itself.

Where to start? This is a sort-of follow up to Life After Life in which Ursula Todd kept going back through bits of her life until she got it "right". Which was also a masterpiece of all-over-the-place what-on-earth-is-the-author-doing-here fiction which I loved. In this book the story is given to Ursula's brother Teddy, which incidentally has me wondering if there are any other bear related names that could come to the fore to make a trilogy. Teddy was a bomber pilot in the second world war and this book goes back and forth in his life from his youth to his old age bringing in the stories of his descendants too. It's less of a wild ride than Life After Life in many ways, but Atkinson still has plenty of authorial magic up her sleeve to twist things around so that you are never sure quite what is going to come next. A really interesting book, and one that could be read with or without having read Life After Life first, indeed you could read it afterwards. As always I'm left intrigued to find out what Kate Atkinson will come up with next!

This is the first volume of the Last Hundred Years Trilogy, it starts with newlyweds Walter and Rosanna Langdon on an Iowa farm welcoming their first child, Frank, into the world on New Year's Day 1920. This volume runs up to 1953 and I presume that Smiley's plan is to eventually finish the three books on New Year's Eve 2019. By the end of this first book the Langdon's children are mostly grown and dispersed into the world beyond Iowa. It's obviously a way to tell the tale of America over a century as well as a family saga. If I have a complaint it is that the fingerposts of history loom up out of the mists of the story and point you from one big historical event to another in a manner that is a bit too obvious in places. But it's a decent family saga underneath that even if it doesn't seem to have quite as many layers to it as I felt it needed. It's not on the same level as something like A Thousand Acres which is a bit disappointing, but only because that book was so good, so deep, so meaningful, and even second best to it is better than a lot of fiction (I also read it numerous years ago and it may have elevated itself in my memory since). I'm very much looking forward to finding out what happens to the Langdon family over the next sixty-seven years.

Ah, this was wonderful, I didn't want it to end, but when it did I was so glad with how it ended. Although I don't think I've read a book of Patrick Gale's that I haven't liked this is certainly the only one that I felt could compete with the first one I read: Notes from an Exhibition. It has the same kind of sweeping through a life story vibe to it. At the beginning of the book we meet Harry in some kind of early twentieth century lunatic asylum kind of place, not where you'd want to be. And then we go back to his childhood and work forward again. Often I hate this kind of device but here it is used very well. Each time we revisit the Harry we met at the beginning of the book we have a bit more idea how he came to be there and the pieces of the puzzle slowly fall into place. A fabulous read.

One of those series where I know I'm pretty much going to love the story no matter whether it's actually any good or not. And fortunately it isn't losing it yet. This story takes Russell and Holmes off to Japan by boat for the first half of the story, and then back to Oxford for the second. A nice balance of home and away with some great characters along the way.

I'm delighted to find a fabulous new mystery series. Great story and characters that don't feel like a rehash of something that I've read before. Nice to find some cops in the UK who aren't misanthropic old men with failing relationships. Yes, I've enjoyed plenty of stories of misanthropic old men with failing relationships! I'm just ready for something else. The only thing I can mark this down for is for having a prologue that I didn't see the point of, and didn't realise where it came in the story until I got to the end and flicked back to it. Apart from that it was top class. I'm looking forward to more.

This was great. I wasn't at all sure that a mystery narrated by an old lady with dementia was going to work at all but it did. There's a modern day storyline where Maud is sure that her friend Elizabeth has gone missing, and it gets tangled up in her head with the story of her sister Sukey who went missing when Maud was a child. There are times when you want to scream at Maud to get it all sorted out, which isn't at all fair, and I think it gives you an insight into what it must be like to live with dementia. The plot was very clever though and I really enjoyed reading it despite finding it upsetting and frustrating at times.